November 07, 2007

Reputation Economies Conference at Yale Law School

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School is proud to present Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. The symposium will be held on December 8, 2007 at Yale Law School in New Haven, CT.

This event will bring together representatives from industry, government, and academia to explore themes in online reputation, community-mediated information production, and their implications for democracy and innovation. The symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Microsoft Corporation.

A distinguished group of experts will map out the terrain of reputation economies in four panels: (1) Making Your Name Online; (2) Privacy and Reputation Protection; (3) Reputation and Information Quality; and (4) Ownership of Cyber-Reputation. See below for more detail on each panel; a current list of confirmed speakers is available at the conference website.

Online registration is available now at: https://wems.worldtek.com/RepEcon. There is a $95 registration fee, which includes lunch. Yale students and faculty and members of the press may attend for free. For more information, see: http://isp.law.yale.edu/reputation.

SYMPOSIUM ON REPUTATION ECONOMIES IN CYBERSPACE

Panel I: Making Your Name Online

Moderator: Jack Balkin - Director, Information Society Project and
Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale
Law School
Panelists:
Michel Bauwens - Founder, The Foundation for P2P Alternatives
Rishab A. Ghosh - Senior Researcher, United Nations University -MERIT
Auren Hofman - CEO, Rapleaf
Hassan Masum - Senior Research Co-ordinator, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health
Beth Noveck - Professor of Law and Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy, New York Law School

This panel will discuss the shifts in the reputation economy that we
are witnessing, largely the transition from accreditation to
participatory, community-based modes of reputation management. Some of
the questions the panel will address include:

What are the new norms for cyber-reputation?
How do these depart from offline models?
How can reputation in one online system be transported to another?
How do SNS and reputation connect?
How do you bootstrap and cash out?

Panel II: Privacy and Reputational Protection

Moderator: Michael Zimmer - Microsoft Resident Fellow, Information Society Project and Post-Doctoral Associate, Yale Law School
Panelists:
Alessandro Acquisti - Assistant Professor of Information Technology and
Public Policy, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and
Management, Carnegie Mellon University
Danielle Citron - Assistant Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law
William McGeveran - Associate Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
Dan Solove - Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School
Jonathan Zittrain - Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation,
Oxford University; Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal
Studies, Harvard Law School

Cyber-reputation management is based on transactions in information
that is often sensitive and is always contextual. This brings up many
questions about the need to protect one's privacy and reputation within
and outside this system.

Some of the questions the panel will address:
How is participation in cyber-reputation systems related to defamation and free speech?
What happens when cyber-reputation spills over into offline activities
and relationships like the political process, job applications, or
school admissions?
What happens when your second life meets your first?
Requiring divulgence of real name or other personal data. Is opting out possible?
Pending legislation on S495 - data security and privacy (Senator Leahy)

Evidently, unlike traditional reputation mechanisms that relied on
small group acquaintances and formal accreditation mechanisms, the
cyber-reputation economy is heavily mediated by technology. This raises
the risk of breaking the delicate checks and balances that are
necessary for the system to ensure quality of both the informational
outcomes and the participants' reputation. This panel will try to
highlight the connections between the way the new systems are built,
and the outcome they produce.

Some of the questions the panel will address:
How can we assure quality in online reputation economies?
What is the connections between the system design and the quality information?
How good are the alternative accreditation mechanisms and how easy are they to hijack?
How can employment discrimination law adapt to the realities of online reputation?

The data and information that are collected in online reputation
systems are both valuable and powerful. The ability to control this
information, store it, process it, access it, and transport it are
crucial to the maintenance of the reputation economy. This panel will
address the important set of questions that concern the ownership of
this information.

Some questions the panel will address:
Who owns one's online reputation? Who owns the metadata?
How portable is online reputation? Should it be transportable from one system to another?
How is reputation connected to the interoperability question? Should we have international standards governing reputation?